Developer Diaries

Condemned 2 Developer Diary Part Five

Now combat is unique for us. Every punch, block, weapon impact, special combat sound; the player has to feel it all! You need to feel like you're really beating someone with that weapon and getting that satisfaction that it is really happening! We want you walking away thinking "That was freakin' intense!"...

Another unique feature we applied to make the experience fully engaging was adding "music combat." This happens at certain times when we want combat to either stand out or when we have a moment of a quick audio boost in the pacing of the game. Once music combat kicks in, you get the sense that you can't quite figure out why cases of combat seemed more intense and visceral. It's basically sets of stylized music riffs that we can pick and have firing off, overlapping with melee combat (click to download):

Each riff is timed out to play on specific impacts, swings, movements, deaths, etc. Then, you add the combat dialogue, deadly yells, the crying pains and of course, the bone-crunching bloody weapon impacts! We've found this to work very well for us. Even with the new additions and new approaches to Condemned 2: Bloodshot, we feel that we've matched the rhythm and tone of the Condemned universe but have cranked it up to an even higher standard.